Queer left politics, pop culture and skepticism

About the author

Alex Gabriel is the author of Godlessness in Theory, a blog about religion and how to leave it, popular rhetoric and political dissent, secular, nerd and LGBT cultures, sexuality and gender or whatever else comes to mind. mralexgabriel@me.com; @AlexGabriel.

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EVENTS

Recently grandmother, you tried to find out where I live. That I don’t want you to contact me should already be clear: in four years at university a bus ride from your home, despite repeated invitations, I never visited; when we’ve been together with relatives, I’ve avoided you; when you’ve tried to converse, I haven’t reciprocated. You’ve given me cash and I’ve donated it, sent me cheques and I’ve recycled them. It seems that you now want to send me more in spite of being told not to, and all the evidence I don’t want a relationship with you.

If you’re getting this message, it’s been relayed to you. Online, where what I write is published, thousands of people are reading it. None know who you are or anything about you, so nothing will come of this; I’ve hesitated to write it even so, but it’s obvious you’ll keep harassing me unless I go on public record telling you to stop.

You strike me as a bully, grandmother – snobby, controlling and contemptuous of everything apart from what you assume to hold status. You show particular contempt for foreigners and anyone ‘coloured’ or ‘nigger brown’ enough for you to deem them foreign, complaining ‘masses of Japanese’ (discernible, you insist, by their eyes) can be found in your nearest city, refusing continental food because of non-existent allergies; for ethnic Jews, warning me once that someone’s name was Goldstein, and for ‘gippos’ even though your mother was a Romany.

You show contempt for any woman not thin, youthful, white and femme enough – including, as it happens, most women I’m into – and for the children in your family born out of wedlock. As for the men I’m into, you call queer people ‘peculiar’. You show contempt for my whole generation and most born since the 1960s, describing us as ill-mannered, our clothing as scruffy and our English, since you’re not familiar with it, as meaningless. (As a graduate in literature, your mourning ‘the language of Shakespeare’ tells me you know little about him or it.) You show contempt for people claiming benefits, as your daughter and I did when she raised me, accusing them of ‘putting their hands out’ while you live off yours in old age.

Worst, you’re contemptuous of anyone who disagrees with you, laughing at, patronising or ignoring them. When you heard I wrote for a living, you commented I never seemed to say much; I don’t talk to you because I don’t waste words. You epitomise the figure of the senior bigot, obsessed with manners but oblivious to your own spite, and unlike some I’m not amused by it. Nor will I insult people your age, manyofwhom have inspired me, by putting your toxic outlook down to being 93.

Being the only one who won’t oblige you has made me a villain. Family members caught in what they see as the crossfire of two warring relatives have called me heartless for trying to indicate passively that I want you to leave me alone. This message might be heartless, but if so you’ve left me no other option, aggressively dismissing every signal I sent that I didn’t want to know you. The only reason others have been caught amid anything is that like a possessive ex, you’ve refused to let go.

This isn’t a warning or an ultimatum. I’ve quit Britain for central Europe and don’t expect to return while you’re alive. If I do you won’t get my address, and I’m now self-reliant enough to avoid staying with relatives at the same time as you. We won’t meet again, and I’m not interested in hearing from you.

If this is upsetting, you should have considered that people you insult, attack and treat with broad derision don’t have to accept it. If it’s only registering now that keeping a relationship with an adult might involve respecting them, too bad. You’ve had too many chances as it is.

The history of gay marriage supposedly goes something like this: In the beginning, gay people were horribly oppressed. Then came the 1970s, where gays – all of whom looked like the men of The Village People – were able to live openly and have a lot of sex. Then, in the 1980s, many gay people died of AIDS – because they had too much sex in the 1970s. This taught them that gay sex is bad. The gays who were left realized the importance of stable, monogamous relationships and began to agitate for marriage and the 1,000+ benefits it would bring. Soon, in the very near future, with the help of supportive, married straight people – and President Obama – gays will gain marriage rights in all fifty states, and they will then be as good and productive as everyone else.

This is, obviously, a reductive and, yes, tongue-in-cheek history. But it is also, sadly, exactly the reductive history that circulates in both the straight and gay media.

So writes Yasmin Nair of the Against Equality collective, introducing the ‘Queer Critiques of Gay Marriage’ section of its anthology Queer Revolution, Not Mere Inclusion. The book is available from AK Press for $15, and if you’re at all interested in better commentary on LGBT issues, you should order it straight away.

Much of gay liberation was founded on leftist and feminist principles, which included a strong materialist critique of marriage. [And] AIDS activism in the 1980s called for universal health care, the demand for which has been abandoned by the gay mainstream in favor of the idea that gays should simply be given health care via marriage.

Liberals and lefties alike, straight and gay, look at gay marriage in countries like Spain and Argentina as the ultimate mark of civilization. They note approvingly that South Africa guarantees a constitutional right to gay marriage, but they have nothing to say about the fact that the same country has over five-million people living with HIV and no similar guarantee for health care.

If you are married, you get to be the good immigrant and bring over your immediate and extended family to set up a family business and send your children to the best schools after years of perseverance and hard work (at least theoretically). If you are not, you can be deported and imprisoned at the slightest infraction and not one of the kinship networks that you are a part of will count in the eyes of the state. In other words, a queer radical critique of the family is not simply the celebration of an outsider status, although it is often that, but an economic critique.

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I’ve liked a few things lately. Snorking them all at once seemed like a good idea.

‘Wild and Untamed Things: why a cult classic still resonates after all these years’, by Sam Wall (Scarleteen)It’s midnight somewhere. And that means that somewhere there are a bunch of people, dressed in fishnets and garish makeup, sitting inside a movie theater shouting at and singing along with the actors onscreen. Because it’s midnight, and that means it’s time for The Rocky Horror Picture Show. There are many theories as to why something that is, arguably, a really bad movie has managed to stay so popular and be so well loved. My theory is that it has to [do] with sex. Specifically, the way the movie portrays sexual desire and queer sexuality.

‘“Why can’t Bailey Jay just have her feelings about RuPaul?” On the trans community and differences of opinion’, by Zinnia JonesWhen we’ve expressed our discomfort with hearing these slurs all the time, they’ve called us “nutty”, “fringe”, “fascists”, “trans lesbians” in a derogatory sense (why they think this is derogatory, I have no idea), “newly minted queers”, “stay at home activists”, and accused trans women of having “male privilege”. They’ve attacked our orientations and our genders. This has gone beyond a respectful difference of opinion.

‘My oppression is not a tool to be used to bolster anti-feminism’, by Marwa Berro (Butterflies and Wheels)Those who hold such opinions, Dawkins included, can kindly fuck off.

‘The Terrifying Familiarity of Elliot Rodger’, by Jonathan Lindsell (Haywire Thought)It isn’t the discussion of Alpha Maledom or punishing women or revenge against humanity. No, it’s the least extreme musings at the start. They’re chilling. Why? Well, because I’ve thought those. Not in Rodger’s exact words, and not in context, but essentially the same. In long periods of singledom, I’ve been lonely and had ‘unfulfilled desires’. Especially when I was younger I’ve felt bitter that guys I had little respect for seemed better with women, I’ve been envious of relationships. I’ve thought that a global karmic fairness probably ought to give me a break.

‘Top 10 Asshole Argument Moves’, by Kaveh Mousavi (On the Margin of Error)To change your argument mid-way without acknowledging it. To pretend your fringe version is the dominant version. Using a complex vocabulary to intimidate. Talking in parables. Adding another aspect to the debate. Assuming things about your opponent’s ideology. Pretending you’re above ideology. Arguing against the analogy instead of the concept. Saying ‘We need more nuance’ and then adding no nuance. Definition fetish[ism].

A coherent, connected set of principles that inform how you think is not a bad thing. Having concepts, words and ways of understanding based on them that frame your politics at large is a good thing.

This blog’s name reacts partly to the limp, illiterate brand of skepticism New Atheist ‘thought leaders’ have at times traded on, which prides itself on being ‘rational’, issue-by-issue and ‘evidenced-based’ at the loss of any context anywhere.

That you don’t understand these things isn’t a sign you’re being a Tru Skeptic and resisting Orwellian brainwashing. It’s a sign you’re failing to think in enough depth.

II.

I’m tired of gay men who pride themselves on being apolitical; the soothing ‘but I’m not political about it’ whenever anyone marginalised says what they are, especially here.

It’s a glib, self-righteous reassurance to the powerful that you won’t rock the boat. ‘I’m gay, but not political about it – so as you were. Don’t let me talk too much about it or too forcefully for comfort.’

If you’re happy not to be politically queer, announcing your ‘thick skin and sense of humour’, the difference between us is probably that gay jokes do bother me; that I’m not alright with being assumed straight; that I won’t accept family members’ uninformed bullshit.

That wasn’t always me. I grew into it in adulthood, allowing anger to take hold; stopped acting over several years as if keeping my head down, being in on the joke and not posing a threat was what I had to do to get respect.

Not settling for the lowest possible standards takes grit. Summoning any when you’re queer in a straight world can be a trial – but when you say you’re not political about it, what I hear is that you haven’t yet learned how to say no.

The article’s original title – mine – asked ‘If Elliot Rodger had been a jihadist, would we saying the same things?’ My reference to him in the text (actually Molly Crabapple’s) as a white terrorist is the one time I explicitly name him a terrorist. And ‘white terrorist’, more than just a terrorist who’s white, implies an ideologue who kills in public to intimidate but is too middle-American to be acknowledged as political.

One serious concern does deserve clarification. I’ve supported Rodger’s labelling as a terrorist because I think he was as much one as Mohammad Sidique Khan, ringleader of the 7/7 bombers, or any such figure. The t-word brought to life the War on Terror’s bogeymen, enabling civil liberties crackdowns and overseas deployments. Using it uncritically risks bolstering authoritarians, and I know that – my hope is that we do so here with a sense of irony, to expose the inconsistency of ‘anti-terror’ rhetoric.

When I say Elliot Rodger was a terrorist, I’m not just critiquing failures to place him in context: I’m arguing the word, at least as used in recent years, was never meant to include (gun)men like him, despite their being much like their more comfortably alien counterparts. I’m not trying to commandeer paranoid fears of terror threats for progressives – I’m trying to destabilise them.

Like Mohammad Sidique Khan, who set off a bomb on the London Underground nine years ago, Elliot Rodger was young, educated and outwardly respectable.

Like Khan, he killed seven people including himself.

My guess based on his demographics is that Roger was probably an atheist – but otherwise, the two were in many ways twin souls.

Both men were part of violent movements with track records – ones which, while not representative of all they claimed to speak for (Muslims and men, respectively), exploited widely held beliefs’ potential at their most extreme.

Both saw themselves as political, each his movement’s defining rhetoric.

Both were radicalised by peer groups, both stated their motives explicitly and both fit the archetypal profile for the kinds of killers who did what they did.

Both, crucially, saw their victims as deserving what they got.

If the Santa Barbara shooter had been a jihadist, not much about him would have been that different – but the media’s reaction would have been the polar opposite.

The truth is that Elliot Rodger was a jihadist – for organised misogyny, if not for organised religion.

Britain’s European elections are in three weeks, with the right-wing UK Independence Party predicted first place.

This blog’s core readers aren’t likely to vote for them, but the party has startling support in parts of UK secularism. Anne Marie Waters, who serves on the National Secular Society’s board of directors, was this month announced as UKIP’s 2015 candidate for Basildon, joining supporters like Pat Condell. (Her site now voices rather sudden fears about ‘erosion of British democracy and identity as a result of our membership of the European Union’.)

Given UKIP’s policies, I have questions for Waters and secularists tempted to vote for them.

The Human Rights Act 1998, modelled on it and passed by Labour to make filing human rights cases easier, is cited frequently – not least by Waters – as demanding abolition of the UK’s 80-plus sharia courts; it’s also referenced by critics of state-maintained ‘faith’ schools. UKIP want to repeal it. (In a likely case of far-right influencing so-called centre-right, the Conservatives have now pledged to do so if reelected.)

Britain, unlike the US, is not constitutionally secular. Without an establishment clause dividing religion and state, these laws are the most powerful we have prohibiting religious privilege and abuse. This renders them essential to work like the NSS’s: scapping them as UKIP propose would make campaigns like those above inordinately harder if not impossible.

2. With Ofsted gone, what will stop fundamentalist schools?

The Office for Standards in Education (Ofsted) does exactly what its name implies, inspecting schools on everything from teaching to pastoral care – a remit which includes maintaining satisfactory science lessons, sex education and social diversity, areas mounting fundamentalism threatens.

While different schools have varying degrees of exemption from Ofsted’s rules, religious ones among them, and there’s evidence it’s granted some extremists far too much leeway, its watchdog role keeps many in check. According to a recent Guardian report, the current government’s ‘free schools’ – often religious, startable by anyone and with no requirement for qualified teachers – fail inspections at three times the average rate; the Office is currently investigating Islamists’ leaked plot in Birmigham to gain control of city schools.

The logical need from a secularist viewpoint is for more robust deployment of Ofsted’s powers. UKIP’s latest manifesto, meanwhile, promised ‘Ofsted will be abolished’, opening potential floodgates to a tidal wave of religious malpractice. (Perhaps on science teaching specifically, we shouldn’t have expected much: it also boasts the party, which ‘look[s] favourably on home education’, is the first ‘to take a sceptical stance on man-made global warming claims’.)

The web page in question is now empty, and leader Nigel Farage has publicly distanced himself from the manifesto, arguing that since he wasn’t in office in May 2010, its doesn’t reflect UKIP under him. (He fails to mention that he was, in fact, leader from 2006 to 2009.) Current events suggest, however, that change is unlikely.

We have been saying for years that we should be more muscular in our defence of Judaeo-Christian culture, and after all, we have a Christian constitution. The Church of England is the established church of this country. What Cameron is doing, once again, was really mimicking what UKIP have been saying.

What happens, as such a party gains support, to prospects for a secular state?

4. What’s UKIP’s record on religious sexism and homophobia?

The NSS has long made equality and human rights a keystone of its work. Many self-declared secularists supporting UKIP and other far-right groups, in fact, do so ostensibly out of commitment to these goals – in particular, to ‘save’ women and gay people from invading Muslims. Beside opposing key laws that safeguard them against religious abuse, then, what’s UKIP’s record on LGBT and women’s rights?

UKIP’s politics, in letter and in spirit, are anti-secular by nature; there are many arguments against a vote for them, but supporting them means siding with a party that consistently opposes disestablishment, appeals to the religious right, allies with them against minorities and women, imperils science and education and welcomes fundamentalists. Their mission is in zero-sum conflict with those of groups like the NSS, in whose place I’d be concerned to have their members on my council of management.

Gordon Brown never managed to live down his tongue-tied boast he’d saved the world. If that came to be his defining gaffe, David Cameron’s claim last week to be continuing God’s work surely has similar potential. ‘Jesus invented the Big Society’, he told Christian authorities at Downing Street a week ago. ‘I just want to see more of it.’

Mockery, lasting several days, broke out on social media. Brown at least had the excuse of a verbal slip-up; his successor’s remarks, in a speech shared on the government’s website, were surely drafted by advisers who thought them a good idea.

More followed. ‘I believe we should be more confident about our status as a Christian country,’ Cameron writes in this week’s Church Times, ‘more ambitious about expanding the role of faith-based organisations, and, frankly, more evangelical’. In a YouTube video, he says much of the same.

One can’t fault the PM for being on-message. Easter provides an annual basketful of reactionary religious soundbites: in 2011, as Cardinal Keith O’Brien attacked ‘aggressive secularism’, Cameron lauded ‘the enormous contribution Christianity has made to our country’; the next year, after Sayeeda Warsi’s ‘militant secularisation’ speech, his Easter message praised an alleged ‘Christian fightback’. ‘This government does care about faith’, he told church leaders in 2013, ‘and it does want to stand up and oppose aggressive secularisation’. (George Carey, ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, accused him of just such aggression the same week, calling Christians a persecuted minority.)

The question lurks: if separating church and state is PC orthodoxy, why haven’t we done it?

It’s hard to be a pariah when national leaders heap praise on you. The test of political correctness is establishment support, which means at least the government’s. You’d think the cabinet could only fawn so much before calling Christianity marginalised became untenable. Seemingly, you’d be wrong. The Cameron government, besotted with the church, claims both to be a rebel force besieged by secularist powers-that-be and to run Britain as it’s always been run. Both can’t be true. Its ministers are the powers-that-be, their view the prevailing one by definition.

Not that they will admit it. Pickles, according to the Guardian, ‘accused the last Labour government of “diminishing Christianity” by suggesting that religion and politics could not mix’. To those of us who regularly say the same, this comes as a surprise. Likely, he has in mind Alistair Campbell’s interjection, ‘We don’t do God’, when a journalist sought details of Tony Blair’s beliefs; the sentence was a guideline in an interview and means of ending it, not a policy statement, but is trotted out ad nauseam by Tories keen to prove themselves more faith-obsessed than Labour was.

Their thirst to do so is an achievement of Blair’s governments, whose ministers fell over themselves as Cameron’s do today to say nice-sounding things involving ‘faith’. Religion, a much plainer-sounding thing, is rarely mentioned. Its followers are now ‘people of faith’, as in ‘of colour’; its hierarchs, especially the established church’s which Pickles admires, have been rebranded ‘faith leaders’. With seats in parliament, legal exemptions and a stranglehold on British education, but barely one percent of the populace in its pews, the C of E is a sick dog spoilt by owners all too aware its time is short.

If saying so is politically correct, it doesn’t feel it. Indeed, ‘faith schools’, the media-friendly name for where governments have herded record numbers of children according to parents’ beliefs, is a very PC term for segregation.

A year from now, we’ll no doubt hear again of an intolerant, aggressive secularism with a grip on Britain. Once they’ve warned us, organised religion’s friends will stretch in their seats of power, pour millions more in public funds toward it and go back to work. Secularists like me will ask ourselves, meanwhile: if we never had it so good, why didn’t we notice?

The programme is Twitter-powered BBC Three debate series Free Speech, whose host Rick Edwards (of Tool Academy and, unexpectedly, Cambridge) makes Nicky Campbell seem subdued, and where no thought is too complex for 140 characters. Producers, show name notwithstanding, spiked the question from a previous edition when officials at Birmingham Central Mosque, where Free Speech filmed on March 13, ‘expressed deep concerns’ about gay Muslims being discussed. The speed at which showrunners acquiesced, postponing the segment, speaks to a wider trend.